In early March 2025, earlier than volatility accelerated and turmoil engulfed the investing world, Warren Hammond’s issued a warning in The Private View: Positioning for the Market Turmoil Forward, 2025–2028, saying, “Iran’s escalating conflicts in mid-April 2025 spotlight world vitality safety dangers. Oil provide disruptions may spike costs.”
Rising Tensions and Systemic Confrontation
It’s now mid-April. This second echoes a theme he has lengthy mentioned. In 2021, he had revealed Funding Themes for the Subsequent Decade. One institutional investor, Boston-based, long-only, not too long ago revisited that be aware, reaching out to debate one concept now rising with urgency: systemic confrontation.
A minor transgression, regional or symbolic, can spiral into world battle. Asia and the West drawn in. That is the Thucydidean Entice: when a rising energy threatens to displace a dominant one. Harvard’s Graham Allison revived this concept in 2015 and expanded it in his 2017 guide Destined for Conflict: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Entice?
Warren Hammond’s Private View: Megatrends & The way forward for capital
Battle in a New Age
Right this moment’s conflict isn’t all the time kinetic. The tech and tariff wars are structural conflicts, world powers contesting the boundaries of a brand new world order. The established order is being washed away (forecast in 2016: The USA – The subsequent 18 years). Instead, a fiery, disruptive, and transformational period led more and more by China and Asia.
Taiwan is the apparent flashpoint in a warmer conflict state of affairs. Since 2016, Warren Hammond wrote about its strategic and symbolic weight in China’s nationwide psyche. However escalation may simply as possible come from the Center East or Ukraine.
Extra essential than the geography is the underlying structural stress between a rising China and an incumbent US. That is not about bilateral competitors, it’s about world reordering.
Classes from Historical past
Since January 2016, he has persistently highlighted that historical past has given us clues. Within the context of the Thucydidean Entice, Allison studied 16 instances the place rising powers confronted established ones. In 12 of them, conflict adopted. Solely 4 resolved peacefully. Key examples embody:
• Sparta vs. Athens (fifth c. BCE)
• Germany vs. Britain (early twentieth c.)
• France vs. Habsburg Spain (sixteenth c.)
• Japan vs. U.S. (early twentieth c.)
• Napoleonic France vs. Britain (early nineteenth c.)
• US vs. British Empire (late nineteenth c.) – a peaceable transition
• Germany vs. Russia (late nineteenth–early twentieth c.)
The lesson? When dominant powers really feel threatened, miscalculation typically results in escalation.
The US-China relationship now sits at that precipice. Whether or not this ignites in Taiwan, Ukraine, Center East or performs out in a cooler “conflict” format in Tariffs and Know-how, or any mixture, it’s and can proceed to redraw the map and most actually redefine and restructure world energy.
How do you suppose world tensions are reshaping our future?
Tell us by leaving a remark under, or ship a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1
Subscribe to The South African web site’s newsletters and comply with us on WhatsApp, Fb, X and Bluesky for the most recent information.
